Rob gave me a 1GB clonepod. Its Chinese designers made a number of...questionable design
decisions, and as a result the player was somewhat broken when I got it.
click here for the rest of the story...

...to hear how my friend rob is spending a lot of time in the gym.
My character is already fucked, so why waste time in the gym? It's
spent way more productively with soldering iron in one hand and
a datasheet printout in the other ;-)

Latest example: I talked to rob earlier this evening (about 3.5hrs ago), and he
asked me how hard it would be to make a Hardcore Gym Timer,
so that he can keep his "8 second blast/12 second slow" training
regime precisely.
click here for the rest of the story...

As I've been tinkering a little bit with electronics and microcontrollers
recently, some more components were required. I dislike wasting money.
And I like bargains.

Somebody sold off his stuff by the kilo, after retiring from an electronics
repair career.
All bandoleered, also mostly labelled and well mixed: a few
strips of transistors and filters/ceramic resonators, resistors, a pile of
chokes/inductors, some tantalums, a pile of ceramic caps, a big pile of
film caps and a bloody huge pile of electrolytics. I said well mixed: all
common values well represented. Ah yes, and more fuse
holders than I'll ever need.

4.7kg of gear, for a whopping total of AU$80. I'm pretty pleased.
But the sorting is a pain.

Current project: making a very obnoxious and loud doorbell with a PIC.
I came up with the necessary microsecond-precision
delay routines and the remaining frequency generation stuff,
and a bit of perl took care of eating a MIDI file and barfing
out suitable frequency and duration information in PIC assembler.

The last insanely horrible tune I've been trialling:
"Innsbruck, ich muß dich lassen". Sounds perfectly ghastly when
a cheap piezo is squarewave-squealing its guts out.
I'm also thinking about using "Tirol isch lei oans" just to remind me
why I'm here and not there.

Here's a pic of the latest test setup: I'm currently learning how to
use an inductor to boost voltages (and how a common collector amplifier
works). Messy but fun.

...cupboard doors into desks, IBM Thinclients into music boxes and
all politicians everywhere into dead politicians. I'm all for it,
and I did my part for the doors and the music player. (And just for
the bloody record, let's get rid of all the governments, too. Yay for Anarchy!
I'm in a bad mood today, as you can surely tell.)
click here for the rest of the story...

Here's some recent projects/happenings.
For my new RC plane I needed reasonable charging facilities,
because most trickle chargers like the one I got with the RC gear are trash.
So after some thinking about building my own charge controller
(not too tricky but time-consuming) I bit the bullet and bought this
SJ Propo Swallow Advance charger: a very nice bit of equipment, charges
pretty much anything from Lead-Acid to Li-Po intelligently, and with nice
options. $90, so not exactly breaking the bank.

But the Swallow is DC only, 11-15V, good for taking with you
in the car, bad for at home. I hate wallwarts. So I need: DC, preferrably
12V at 3-5A. But I have: loads of lousy underpowered wallwarts (bad)
and loads of old garbage (good). Because the old garbage contains
the innards of a few Sun SCSI enclosures, some of which came with brilliant
fanless Sony-made switching PSUs. APS-28: old, silent, solid, juicy
and saucy :-)

Time for the tinker: it simply took a few galvanised nails, some foam and
a bit of soldering to convert the Molex outlets to posts for crocodile clamps.
(There is extra insulation behind the foam, but the sparkies
wouldn't be too happy with the design. Screw 'em!)

That PSU now also replaces three wallwarts, which makes me really happy.
I fabricated some custom charging leads from scrap (old wires, some computer
connectors, crocodile clamps from rotten test leads etc.)
next: one 12V lead for the Yaesu VX5R which has its own
charge controller (Li-Ion) and a tiny plug, one 12V fat plug for the
CDMA phone's charger-stand (with its own controller).

The fat plug also
works with the cordless drill, now and only after I gutted the drill
charger stand: first I connected the Swallow to that, but the stand
actually contains a few resistors for trickle charging. The Swallow
blasted a few Amps at about 19V across that, the resistor got a tiny little
bit hot, the stand plastic started growing surrealistic in shape
and I quickly stopped things before the Magic Smoke got out.
Now: gutless stand, brains in the charger. Me happy.

Another recent successful tinkerproject was modding Guntis' radio: he
wanted a remote PTT switch to connect to his small speaker-mike sitting on his
shoulder, just like
the setup I've used for the last two years. (My
new in-helmet setup was tested on Sunday and works superbly.)
So I hunted up parts, traced the wiring in his speakermike and Simply Dit It.
First I rewired the speakermike to activate on the PTT switch, and then
I built a new remote PTT switch from scratch.

Here's the switch I made for him: 100% recycled components! :-)

The switch is a leftover from a dead computer mouse that I desoldered,
the cable with conveniently moulded-on mono plug comes from a
first-crap-then-defunct $50 "stereo system", the button (for improved
tactile feedback with gloves)
is from the sewing kit my great-aunt left me, and the velcro was a leftover
from some other project. Even the idea for the switch is recycled:
this guy had
it first :-)
(Ok, solder, superglue and shrinktube were new. Sue me.)

And the next projects are already on the horizon: exploring the
wonderful world of PIC microcontrollers. These things are cool!
(I recently spent about $250 on a better multimeter and a bunch of chips,
and may soon spend another up-to-$800 on an oscilloscope.
Learning electronics is fun, but getting a reasonable set of tools is not
-- for a money-concious person like me.)

Here's my first pic circuit: it toggles the led state on every switch
activation, debounced in software. Looks like nothing, better stuff to follow
soon because I've got shitloads of wacky ideas that I want to implement...